Old postcards Herbs

This section of Soviet postcards on medicinal plants is almost entirely made up of cards printed in 1977, each devoted to a single species. Familiar plants of the temperate forest zone — field horsetail, greater plantain, Scots pine, hawthorn — sit next to species you would hardly expect in such a set: Arabica coffee, oleander and the oil poppy. The only card from a different year is Lilies, printed in 1978.

The most Siberian card is Leuzea (1977), the plant botanists call Rhaponticum carthamoides. It grows wild in the mountains of southern Siberia, the Altai and the Western Sayan, and its traditional name, maral root, comes from the maral deer that feed on it. Paeonia anomala (1977), a wild peony found from northern European Russia to Mongolia and the Tien Shan, is another plant of the same region. Arabica Coffee brings in the tropics: wild Coffea arabica grows only in the forests of Ethiopia, southern Sudan and Yemen.

Several of the plants here are poisonous even though they serve as raw material for medicines: lily of the valley, pheasant’s eye (Adonis vernalis) and oleander all contain cardiac glycosides, and greater celandine, a member of the poppy family, is toxic too. These vintage postcards are best read as a botanical series, not as a medical reference.

Because nearly every card dates from 1977, collectors can build a consistent botanical run here, adding valerian, oregano or wild strawberry to the species mentioned above.